San Diego was extremely San Diego today.

In not-very-good news, extreme winds (114 mph gusts) on the early morning of the 25th caused significant damage to the 36" Great Refractor at Lick Observatory. Half of the main shutter broke off and landed on the main building.

Awful news. The Lick Observatory is a gorgeous instrument.

The first data from NASA's SPHEREx mission are out! Check out this video, showing the entire sky in infrared light. The Milky Way runs as a band across the center. Each frame shows a different infrared wavelength, with light from stars, hot gas, and cosmic dust. 🔭🧪 www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-s...

More people on my timeline are discussing a show based on Stucky fanfic than the Doomsday teaser, and I hope the studio is paying attention.

Hubble has imaged the largest planet-forming disk ever seen! At 400 billion miles wide, it is roughly 40 times the diameter of our solar system. The disk is unexpectedly chaotic and turbulent, offering new insights into how planetary systems form: https://bit.ly/477sQ9b 🔭 🧪

This is also why we are now the people who put pups in strollers.

Yup, there's nothing like seeing students consistently turn in wrong answers in astro and physics to make me have zero confidence in anything currently being marketed to us as trustworthy.

nothing condemns Our Times more than the fact we appear to have *mostly democratically* elevated to power some of the most stupid assholes who have ever lived. something is wrong with a country and system that ferrets out its most undisputedly horrible citizens and then gives them nuclear codes

It's the time of year when you need to read my beloved @gregvaneekhout.bsky.social's science fictional Christmas tale.

LeoLabs says they see hundreds of debris objects from the Starlink failure event

The AAS is deeply concerned by the recent announcement that the NSF intends to “restructure” the NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) by narrowing the scope of its scientific investigations and stripping it of key assets used in those investigations. aas.org/posts/news/2... 🔭

3/3 Good things come in threes, so here is a third flyover of our DTM from our 100,000th observation of Mars. https://uahirise.org/ESP_089986_1980

1/3 Here is one of several flyovers our digital terrain model group created from a DTM of our 100,000th observation of Mars!

2/3 Another flyover from our DTM of our 100,000th observation.

As James says, this isn't even about climate. It's about all the tools, platforms, models, datasets we use to study and forecast weather and understand how it impacts people, too.

They’re stealing from us. They are stealing from us and we have to put a stop to this. This cannot stand.

MRO deserves way more love than it receives. What an amazing spacecraft! Congratulations to its team!

3/3 If you’ve been following my work this won’t come as a surprise. I’ve once again updated the family portrait of the Solar System’s giant planets captured in near infrared by JWST Full size+info flic.kr/p/2oUkYSY 🧪🔭 I’ll keep updating it whenever an improved version of these giants is released🙂

Okay, this is a weird one. science.nasa.gov/missions/web...

The thing you need to understand about the Right is that they are absolutely fine just plain burning down higher education if taking it over ideologically doesn’t work. They’re perfectly happy reducing it to ashes.

I spent part of my morning answering questions from a planetarium show audience, one of which was about AI in astronomy. I discussed how machine learning has been used for decades and the difference between curated datasets by folks who are PAID for their labor and generative-AI crap.

There's always one detail that will crack your heart entirely open.

Proud of the BDH journalists serving the mission under tough and tragic circumstances.

New images of interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS are coming in! This one, from the Gemini North observatory, was taken a couple weeks ago but just released today. The green glow is probably due to emission from diatomic carbon. 🧪🔭 noirlab.edu/public/news/...

NEW: First Radio Detection of Rare Supernova Type, Revealing Secrets of Stellar Death Brand new discovery from the Very Large Array! 💥 Astronomers have captured the first-ever radio signals from a rare class of stellar explosion known as a Type Ibn supernova. #Astronomy #RadioAstronomy #Supernova

Three different people called me "cool" this week (which is three more than in my whole life previous), and so many students said such nice things about their experience in my courses this semester, and I would just like to know what I did so I can keep doing it.

Top: Sunset on Mars (Curiosity rover, April 2015) Bottom: Sunset on LV-426 (Alien, 1979)

NEW: Five years of social media history is only a fraction of what the US Government will shortly demand of overseas visitors. The full requirements will end tourism in the United States. Below is the full, mind-blowing list. 🚨THEY. WANT. YOUR. DNA.🚨 1/

#NASAWebb has detected a thick blanket of gas surrounding the distant lava world TOI-561 b, challenging the idea that small planets so close to their stars are not able to sustain atmospheres: https://bit.ly/3MvZQRQ 🔭 🧪

NASA lost contact with the MAVEN spacecraft orbiting Mars on Saturday. They're working the problem in an attempt to reestablish contact with MAVEN. There's no reason right now to suspect the spacecraft has been lost. It's just not phoning home when it should be. science.nasa.gov/blogs/maven/...

Webb breaks its own record by identifying the earliest supernova to date, a star that exploded when the Universe was only 730 million years old. To astronomers' surprise, this early supernova looks exactly like modern supernovae based on data gathered so far 👉 www.esa.int/Science_Expl... 🔭🧪

It appears that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has, within the past week, scrubbed a large amount of climate change content from its official website, as well as *removed human-caused warming* from the discussion on its "causes of climate change" page.

There is no tsunami threat to the US.

Heartbreaking. The University of Nebraska will terminate its entire Earth science department. One of the country's most successful and respected geology & climate programs: gone. When ideologues & politicians are threatened by the very act of studying climate change, I wonder: who of us is next?

One of my incredible Detroit mentors is lost to me now (dementia), but when I was a new professor, he curated an exhibit @ the Detroit Public Library about the Emancipation Proclamation & the Reconstruction Amendments. I'll never forget him making me repeat every word. Henceforth and forever free.

This little one hasn’t been feeling so good, but she is still her soft, funny self.

Samples of Bennu, a primitive asteroid orbiting near Earth, contain some surprising ingredients: natural sugars, gummy polymers, and specks of stardust that are even older than our solar system. There's a lot of complex chemistry brewing in space! 🧪🔭 www.nasa.gov/missions/osi...

Electric Sparks Detected By Perseverance In Mars Dust Devils And Storms astrobiology.com/2025/12/elec... #astrobiology #Mars

Our #MarsExpress spots a strange shape on Mars, formed as a space rock collided with the planet's dusty surface. It's known as a 'butterfly crater' but we see a walnut, an insect, the Eye of Sauron, or perhaps a moth... what do you think? More info and images 👉 www.esa.int/Science_Expl... 🔭 🧪

Meanwhile in space www.nature.com/articles/d41... 🔭

Astronomers have used Webb to trace out the history of the dance between the dwarf galaxies NGC 4490 and NGC 4485! 💃 Discover their history 👉 www.esa.int/ESA_Multimed... 🔭

🌞🛰️Sun-watcher SOHO turns 30! 🎂 "SOHO has overcome nail-biting challenges to become one of the longest-operating space missions of all time" – Prof. @cmundell.esa.int , ESA Director of Science 👉 www.esa.int/Science_Expl... 🔭🧪

Look at this image (and thread - use the translate service). This one reads along the lines of: "..Comet C/2025 A6 (Lemmon) without cleaning. In just 15 minutes of acquisition, we counted 1,659 satellite trails (about 400 individual ones). Words cannot describe the pollution of near space." 🔭

Haters say “do it the right way,” but we're being arrested at our green card appointments. “What risk did the community face from my client who... is the caregiver to his 17-year-old son, works, pays taxes, has no criminal history and was applying for a green card."

My 10 year old just chewed through @gregvaneekhout.bsky.social's The Ghost Job which they recommend as a very fun paranormal heist story with techbro necromancers and savvy kids who know wage theft when they see it.

not to absolve universities of agency, but the very fact that media institutions like @nytimes.com are unwilling or unable to describe a Trump-run “protection racket” in plain language is one reason said universities capitulate we can’t win if we sell each other out

You read that right - we’re doing a sale *AND* free stuff! Inflation be damned! We don’t do sales often, and this one won’t last long, so get it while you can! monkeyminion.com

It's Friday, and apparently bluesky is ready for this fun revelation: Dinosaurs lived on the other side the Galaxy.

I have just learned that when they found out CDC's search tool was down, The Immunization Action Coalition put together a page with various search tools for vaccines, with different categories - could be useful to people: www.vaccineinformation.org/vaccine-basi...